Finite and Infinite Games

Sarah Morris
Finite and Infinite Games
2017
HD Digital
40:16 minutes

Sarah Morris employs architecture as a strategy for cinematic and theatrical potential in her films, placing her camera, the audience and herself in situations that evoke multiple meanings and scenarios. Morris shifts her lens to Alexander Kluge, the legendary German theorist and writer, who studied under Adorno and Horkheimer, a lawyer for the Frankfurt School, and paramount filmmaker of the New German Cinema; the recently finished but not yet utilized architecture of the controversial philharmonic space in Hamburg designed by the architects Herzog and de Meuron.

The short film of approximately 40 minutes will be shot using the philharmonic space as the stage and context for a philosophical conflict. Morris uses the concert hall in juxtaposition with a reading and dialogue between the artist and Kluge about James Carse’s seminal text, “Finite and Infinite Games”. The work lays out two opposing worldviews of structuring activity, politics, thinking, navigation, strategy and creativity. Kluge speaks of his experience as the Frankfurt School’s lawyer, working for Fritz Lang as well as his position as a theorist, writer and filmmaker. Carse’s theory of games becomes a starting point and encompasses all sociological and individual moments, whether it is aesthetic or otherwise. The juxtaposition between the freedom of infinite possibilities versus the rule-based operation of finite game playing are at the center of a dichotomy succinctly laid out by Kluge and Morris.